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One week ago, Beyoncé released a sprawling 27-track album, the second in a promised trilogy. In the days since, it has dominated conversations about country music in America.

In the decade I have lived in California, I’ve learned to be on edge for “The Big One”—an earthquake so powerful, it can bring down houses. The roughly 10 or so tremors I have actually experienced haven’t been like that. Mostly, the shakes are big enough to jolt me upright but small enough to leave me doubting: Was that what I thought it was?
Today, tens of millions of East Coasters got to experience that feeling firsthand when a magnitude 4.

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In the first few months after the release of ChatGPT, AI chatbots felt, to many, like magic: They conjured poems and cocktail recipes, and secretly did at least one writer’s job. These programs appeared to be the first nonhuman entity to master human language, and many people ascribed them with intelligence, even sentience.

A rift has opened between Israel and the United States. No breach between the two countries has been as wide or as deep since the mid-1950s, when the Eisenhower administration compelled Israel to withdraw from the Sinai Peninsula. President Joe Biden expressed grave displeasure with Israel this week over the strike that killed seven aid workers from World Central Kitchen, and a phone call between him and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu yesterday was reportedly tense.

As an actor, Dev Patel has tended to play bighearted softies in rousing crowd-pleasers. Though he’s occasionally ventured beyond such territory—see his brooding, magnetic work in 2021’s The Green Knight—Patel’s résumé highlights include playing an embattled game-show contestant in Slumdog Millionaire, a kind manager in the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel films, and a haunted adoptee in Lion.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
The Trump campaign is trying to turn the electoral process into a moral swamp. Voters are going to have to pace themselves to get to November.
First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
Joe Biden lowered drug prices.

Imagine a city of staggering, sometimes menacing beauty. Its history is bloody, but it carries on, becoming more mesmerizingly strange with each era.
Now imagine that the city is sentient. It has agency and consciousness; it decides who gets to stay and who needs to leave. It’s both a physical place and an ambient spirit that constantly inhabits different forms; it can seduce a visitor and twist time backwards.

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present and surface delightful treasures. Sign up here.
Cosmically speaking, the alignment of Earth, the sun, and the moon is ordinary. But from our corner of the universe, the occurrence produces something wondrous: a total solar eclipse. On April 8, the moon will pass between the sun and Earth, casting a shadow along a narrow strip of the country, from Texas to Maine.

I frequently ask ChatGPT to write poems in the style of the American modernist poet Hart Crane. It does an admirable job of delivering. But the other day, when I instructed the software to give the Crane treatment to a plate of ice-cream sandwiches, I felt bored before I even saw the answer. “The oozing cream, like time, escapes our grasp, / Each moment slipping with a silent gasp.” This was fine. It was competent. I read the poem, Slacked part of it to a colleague, and closed the window.

In the spring of 1825, Ludwig van Beethoven was struck by a gut ailment so severe that he thought he might die. That summer, after he recovered, he returned to the string quartet he’d been writing before his illness—Quartet No. 15 in A Minor, Op. 132—and added a new segment inspired by his survival.